Your Suffering E-Book

Angel Rupert

• Herausgeber: Bentockiz
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

You turn to face me, have sensed my gaze all along but waited it out, another gift. You find my eyes and grasp the love they speak. You smile at that, pleased, but don’t move to bridge the few yards between us. Exchanged across that gap is whole love, a thing as undeniable as the air we breathe, the sun we praise. Love without touching.

Leseprobe

Title Page

Your Suffering

Without Consolation

Angel Rupert

Your Suffering / 4th of series: Without Consolation / By Angel Rupert

Published 2023 by Bentockiz

e-book Imprint: Uniochlors

e-book Registration: Stockholm, Sweden

e-book ISBN: 9789198847130

e-book editing: Athens, Greece

Cover Images created via AI art generators

Table of Contents

Title Page

Introduction

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Introduction

Through books we come into contact with everything important that has happened in the past, analyzing also current events and putting our thoughts together to predict the future. The book is a window to the world, acquiring valuable knowledge and sparking our vivid imagination. It is a means of entertainment and is generally seen as a best friend, or as a slave that carries together all valuable information for us. The book is a friend who stays together without demands, a friend you call upon at every moment and abandon when you want.

It accompanies us in the hours of boredom and loneliness, while at the same time it entertains us. In general, a book does not ask anything from us, while it waits patiently on a dusty shelf to give us its information, to get us out of dead ends and to travel us to magical worlds.

This may be the travel mission of our books. Abstract narration, weird or unconscious thoughts difficult to be understood, but always genuine and full of life experiences, these are stories of life that can’t be overlooked easily.

This may be the start of something amazing.

Chapter One

Zach sat opposite Barton in their usual orientation in Barton’s living room on Tuesday afternoon. Barton had arrived home early the morning before after taking the “red-eye” from San Francisco. He’d taken a cab home since Zach had class that morning. After a long nap, he’d spent that day going through the mountain of mail Zach had left on his breakfast table, and trying to readjust to life in his quiet empty country house that looked to have survived his absence and Zach’s oversight in good condition (though he did notice the receiver was set to an unfamiliar radio station). He’d talked with Zach on the phone last night, but this was their first meeting since his return, their first time together in sixteen days.

He was happy to see Zach, had missed him and thought of him often while away, sent him two postcards and one rambling hand-written letter. But he also felt a fleeting moment’s reluctance on first seeing Zach and giving him a firm and prolonged handshake—a reluctance to resume full emotional guardianship of this one who, despite the external appearance of calm and stability, was being whipsawed by powerful needs and demands, most of them of his own choosing and blind quest.

But no sooner had he felt that reluctance then he felt the pang of guilt—how could he shy from the care of this hapless searcher who’d recklessly offered—thrust—his whole self and life to Barton’s personal care and well-being? And hadn’t he asked for as much, not only from this new-found and watchful attendant but for years before his arrival, howling in despair and longing into the dark and lonely night from that dark and lonely corner of his being where soul-partner and life-mate were supposed to reside? Was Zach the one to fill that void, sent by, as Dottie said, “the Lord?” And if he was or might be, how could he now shrink from the reciprocal attentions required? Decades of entanglements in the emotional firestorms of his students had left him jaded and wearied by the prospect of immersing himself in another such tempest. But he was already there, wasn’t he? Besides, Zach was no normal student. The gifts he offered and the needs he displayed—the devotion and its obverse, the hunger—were deeper and more complex than any he’d known since his mother died, and all apparently outside the possibility of physical intimacy (though he’d not fully given up on that score). Well, here the kid was, big as life, and he wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

Barton silently handed a flat parcel loosely wrapped in a single sheet of folded white tissue paper across the sunlit gap between them. It was late afternoon. The December sun, liberated from summer’s screen of dense foliage, poured unabashedly through the wall of windows.

Zach accepted the parcel with a questioning tilt of his head. “Early Christmas?”

Barton shook his head once. “Late thanks.”

“None required,” he said, then added with a grin, “But gladly accepted.” He peeled aside the tissue paper to expose a thin volume titled Divine Instruction. He immediately recognized the custom binding and top quality printing and paper.

“A limited edition,” Barton explained, “Of some of my Bible translations. Max just completed the printing. You’re the first to receive a copy.”

“It’s beautiful, Barton.” Zach leafed through the pages with great care. He paused at the inscription:

To Zach

at the start of a new life: his, ours

with love and high hopes

Barton Cosgrove

December, 1979.

“Thank you, Barton—for the book and the inscription.”

“The thanks is all mine, Zach. You’ve helped me in ways you’ll never know, in ways I didn’t know until I had a chance to get away and gain a little perspective.”

“As I’ve said all along, that blessing goes in two directions.”

“I know. I just don’t want either of us to forget how important you are to me.”

Zach nodded and set the book gingerly on the glass-topped end table beside the chair.

They spent the next half-hour catching each other up on all the news, babbling like two schoolgirls reunited after summer vacation—that garrulous and effusive. Zach filled Barton in on all the happenings around campus, on his classes and schoolwork and progress on the novel, on Thanksgiving at Larry and Celine’s, on the weather. Barton gave Zach a day-by-day account of his entire time in California—five days at Max and Dora’s, two-days at Berkeley, then a week at the Clift Hotel in downtown San Francisco. He told him about all the fine meals he’d had, about the two plays and the two operas and the one recital (Leontyne Price, his dear friend, in a solo performance) he’d attended, about all the old acquaintances he renewed (hinting that a couple of those acquaintances were of something more than the platonic variety).

During this exchange free of expectation or demand—just two schoolgirls gabbing, not bouncing on a frilly pink twin bed with the BeeGees droning in the background but close enough—Zach had a chance to notice just how good Barton looked, how rested and relaxed and happy, quite different from any Barton he’d known or seen, with the possible exception of that afternoon with Sir William.